ISBN: 9781525815829
Publication Date: August 18, 2020
Publisher: Graydon House Books
Poised to celebrate Christmas Eve on a beautifully scenic
island off the coast of Ireland, the Moone family’s holiday is instead marred
by tragedy. So begins Helen Cullen’s stirring family saga, THE DAZZLING
TRUTH (Graydon House; August 18, 2020; $17.99 USD). Maeve and Murtagh
Moone’s love story began in 1978, at Trinity College. As an aspiring actress
and potter respectively, the two creative spirits were drawn to each other in
an intense and lasting way, able to withstand almost anything, even Maeve’s
bouts of crippling depression and anxiety. For a short time, anyway.
Marriage and children are the next chapters in the Moone
family story, but Maeve struggles to reconcile her old life with that of the
wife and mother she is supposed to be. Until one heartbreaking Christmas Eve in
2005 changes everything. Now each member of the Moone family must learn to
confront the past on their own, until one dazzling truth brings them back
together towards a future that none of them could have predicted. Except
perhaps Maeve herself.
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Inis Óg: 2005
Murtagh had woken that morning, once again, to an empty bed;
the sheets were cool and unruffled on Maeve’s side. He had expected to find her
sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in her hound’s-tooth shawl, pale and thin
in the darkness before dawn, a tangle of blue-black hair swept across her high
forehead like a crow’s wet wing, her long, matted curls secured in a knot at
the nape of her neck with one of her red pencils. He had anticipated how she
would start when he appeared in the doorway. How he would ignore, as he always
did, the few moments it would take for her dove-grey eyes to turn their focus
outward. For the ghosts to leave her in his presence. The kettle would hiss and
spit on the stove as he stood behind her wicker chair and rubbed warmth back into
her arms, his voice jolly as he gently scolded her for lack of sleep and
feigned nonchalance as to its cause.
But Maeve wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table.
Nor was she meditating on the stone step of the back door
drinking milk straight from the glass bottle it was delivered in.
She wasn’t dozing on the living-room sofa, the television on
but silent, an empty crystal tumbler tucked inside the pocket of her
peacock-blue silk dressing gown, the one on which she had painstakingly
embroidered a murmuration of starlings in the finest silver thread.
Instead, there was an empty space on the bannister where her
coat should have been hanging.
Murtagh opened the front door and flinched at a swarm of
spitting raindrops. The blistering wind mocked the threadbare cotton of his
pyjamas. He bent his head into the onslaught and pushed forward, dragging the
heavy scarlet door behind him. The brass knocker clanged against the wood; he
flinched, hoping it had not woken the children. Shivering, he picked a route in
his slippers around the muddy puddles spreading across the cobblestoned
pathway. Leaning over the wrought-iron gate that separated their own familial
island from the winding lane of the island proper, he scanned the dark horizon
for a glimpse of Maeve in the faraway glow of a streetlamp.
In the distance, the sea and sky had melted into one
anthracite mist, each indiscernible from the other. Sheep huddled together for
comfort in Peadar Óg’s field, the waterlogged green that bordered the Moones’
land to the right; the plaintive baying of the animals sounded mournful.
Murtagh nodded at them.
There was no sight of Maeve.
As he turned back towards the house he noticed Nollaig
watching him from her bedroom window. The eldest daughter, she always seemed to
witness the moments her parents had believed—hoped—were cloaked in
invisibility, and then remained haunted by what she had seen. Ever since she
was a toddler, Murtagh had monitored how her understanding grew, filling her
up, and knew it would soon flood her eyes, always so questioning, permanently.
He waved at her as he blew back up the pathway. Later, he
would feel the acute pain of finally recognising the prescience his daughter
seemed to have absorbed from the womb.
‘How long is she gone?’
Nollaig was now standing before the hallway mirror, her face
contorted as she vigorously tried to brush her frizzy mouse-brown hair into
shape. She scraped it together into a tight ponytail that thrust from the back
of her head as if it were a fox’s brush.
‘Ach, you should leave your gorgeous curls be, Noll,’ her
father cajoled, ‘instead of fighting them.’
She smiled at him but slammed the mother-of-pearl hairbrush
down on the sideboard.
‘I don’t have curls, I have Brillo pads,’ she sighed. ‘Did
she say where she was going?’
Murtagh squeezed his daughter’s arm as he continued into the
kitchen. ‘I’m sure your mother is just out for a walk. Happy birthday, love. Lá
breithla shona duit.’
He placed a small copper saucepan of water on the range to
boil and waved the invitation of an egg at his daughter. She nodded
begrudgingly and curled into the green-and-gold striped armchair that sat in
front of the stove.
‘With your white nightdress, you could almost pass for the
Irish flag,’ he joked, and was gratified with her snort of glee.
He watched the clock hand count three minutes in silence.
Expected any moment to hear his soaked wife splash through the door. He was
poised, ready to run towards her with a towel and hushed reprimands for her
careless wandering, but the boiling, cooling, cupping, cracking and spooning of
each egg passed uninterrupted. Nollaig yawned, stretching her arms and legs
before her in a stiff salute.
‘Why don’t you go back to bed for an hour?’ Murtagh asked.
‘We’ll all have proper breakfast together later.’
She eyed him with suspicion but acquiesced. ‘If Mam’s not
back soon,’ she said, sidling away, ‘come and wake me. Promise? We’ll go out
and find her. Remind her what day it is, for God’s sake.’
Murtagh nodded, ushered his daughter out of the kitchen and
watched her climb the stairs.
Born on Christmas Eve, twenty years before, she was the only
one of their children who came into the world via Galway maternity hospital and
not into the impatient arms of Máire O’Dulaigh, the midwife of the island. She
resented it; how it made her feel less of a true islander. What was more, the
specialness of her own day for individual attention, her birth day, was irrevocably
lost in the shared excitement of Christmas. In retrospect, it had been a
mistake, perhaps, naming her Nollaig, the Irish for Christmas, and further
compounding the association. No nickname had ever stuck, however. She wasn’t
the sort of child who inspired others to claim her for their own with the
intimacy of a given name.
‘Born ancient,’ her little sister, Sive, always said of her,
with bored disdain.
And Murtagh sympathised. Nollaig carried the weight of being
the eldest with pained perseverance, heavy responsibilities that were
self-imposed. Her mother harboured a not always silent resentment of it, and it
seemed only natural, if unfair, that Maeve and Sive gravitated more towards
each other; the baby of the family shared her mother’s wit and wildness and
often expressed the irritation her mother tried to hide at Nollaig’s sense of
duty.
Excerpted from The Dazzling Truth by Helen Cullen, Copyright
© 2020 by Helen Cullen.
Published by Graydon House Books
About the author:
HELEN CULLEN wrote her debut novel, The Lost
Letters of William Woolf, while completing the Guardian/UEA novel writing
program. She holds an MA in Theatre Studies from University College Dublin and
is currently studying further at Brunel. Prior to writing full-time, Helen
worked in journalism, broadcasting and most recently as a creative events and
engagement specialist. Helen is Irish and currently lives in London.
Social Links:
Twitter: @WordsofHelen
Instagram: @WordsofHelen
Facebook: @WordsofHelen
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